


it ain't so easy, but it's not too hard

by youremyqueen



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Consent, Developing Relationship, Explicit Sexual Content, Friends With Benefits, M/M, Rough Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-08
Updated: 2016-04-08
Packaged: 2018-06-01 01:46:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6496015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youremyqueen/pseuds/youremyqueen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dorian and Bull go from friends to friends with benefits to very good friends with very good benefits.</p>
            </blockquote>





	it ain't so easy, but it's not too hard

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Не легко, но и не слишком сложно](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8596153) by [wakeupinlondon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wakeupinlondon/pseuds/wakeupinlondon)



> here’s some typical shit for you right here, loaded with all the dorian/bull fic cliches anyone could ask for. this is just 17k of self indulgence, brought on by my love for the underlying themes of this pairing’s fandom, which seem to be: consent, outgrowing one’s shitty upbringing, and learning how to have feelings. takes “an ill-advised night after drinking” with a grain of salt, takes canon with a grain of salt in general, and is probably a load of nonsense.
> 
> title is from donnie trumpet and social experiment’s _slip slide_ , a song which features, among others, busta rhymes. so there.

The only reason Dorian begins to like the Iron Bull in the first place is because it takes more effort to maintain his dislike than he’s comfortable expending for the sake of any person save himself, or the Inquisitor; the latter being because her fate is inextricably entwined with that of the world, the former being blatant favoritism. 

Dorian expects good will from a Qunari the way one expects pleasure from a bee sting, no less a Ben-Hassrath spy, and so he cannot be blamed for his tentative wariness. When he explains this position, in one of their earliest civil conversations, the Bull just raises the one eyebrow he has, the planes of his face shifting the way his eyepatch sits, and says lightly, “Okay, I’m threatening, I get it. And you, as a Tevinter mage, what are you?” 

Dorian rolls his eyes. “A little cross with myself for bothering to apologize.”

“An apology would probably have come across better if you didn’t have one hand on your staff the whole time.” Bull doesn’t appear offended. Despite wearing his usual easy grin, he’s taking Dorian’s attempt to clear the air rather soberly, attention fully focused on him.

Dorian’s hand trembles minutely with discomfort as he releases the steely grip he hadn’t even realized he’d been holding. “Force of habit. I’ve no intention of—I really didn’t notice. I’ll cast nothing your way as long as you keep _those_ ,”—he gestures to the top of Bull’s head—“pointed away from me.”

“Sure. Wasn’t intending anything else. The horns are more there for decoration than weaponry, anyway. I’ve taken out a chandelier or two in my time, but I let the axe settle most quarrels.”

Dorian stands stiff in the swaying grass. “Then let me take pains to reassure you that we have none between us.”

The Hinterlands are green with peaking summer and last night’s campfire is still smoldering in the center of the clearing, dragging a grey line along the morning’s waking sky. Lavellan and Vivienne are still asleep, and Harding has only just stirred. Dorian watches her tent wriggle like a nervous beast as she climbs out of it.

“Never thought we did. I figured you’d take the hint once I saved your shiny ass in battle a few times.” Bull eyes him up and down with the usual appreciation, and for the sake of camaraderie and other Inquisition rot of the like, Dorian doesn’t push the issue, even though his ass is perfectly matte, thanks very much.

“If I’d realized,” he says instead, managing to rally himself into some backhanded politeness, “I’d probably have cast a few more barriers on you in return.” Nevermind that Bull gets on just fine in the worst of the carnage without an inch of help. Dorian’s paid him enough of a compliment by bothering to notice, and would rather not further flatter him with verbal acknowledgement.

Bull takes it, as he takes everything Dorian has ever said, well-meant or not, with good humor. He knocks him once on the shoulder with his broad grey hand, and says, “No hard feelings, big guy. Well, maybe one or two.”

Dorian convinces himself for a while that all he feels in return is mild exasperation.

 

—

 

The Iron Bull, article and all, ends up proving himself all the less intimidating the more time one is exposed to him. He likes jokes, he likes words that rhyme, likes songs that don’t lose their cadence even when slurred. He talks about fights he’s had, gutsy and bloody, all that you’d expect, and propositions a good third of anyone he meets, but he also gets a kick out of arguing Tevinter politics, takes no offense to any criticism leveled at the Qun, and once breaks a man’s wrist for fondling Sera in a Redcliffe pub.

“Coulda done him meself, thanks,” is her wide-eyed acknowledgement, bow only just strung as the man drops to his knees, yowling a plea for mercy that hurts Dorian’s ears.

The Bull doesn’t blink. “Sorry,” he tells her. “Didn’t mean to step on your toes. It’s a reflex.”

Lavellan, eyes wide and pleased, clamps down on her smile for the sake of maintaining the image of the grave military leader, but shares a look with Dorian that says, _See? I pick them well_ , though her spoken response is nothing but a clipped, “And a right one,” stepping forward so that the man has to squirm out of her path.

Dorian follows last. He has no such reflex. When he sees a wrong committed, the instinct that was bred into him is to turn his head and ignore it. The unsmiling, unbending parts that raise a weapon, a word in retaliation are self-taught, and hard earned. It still takes him a moment to catch up.

It’s good, he thinks, actively for the first time, that Bull is here. 

 

—

 

 _Skirt_ , he says, or sometimes _conquer_ , _hold_ , _take_ , _staff_ , and it’s not the content, the stuff of Orlesian penny romances, that holds Dorian’s attention for longer than it should be held by anything that spends a quarter hour sniffing the dragon’s blood on its armor and grunting appreciatively, but the tone of voice.

It’s not a new sensation. He’s known plenty of men, from his early adolescence onwards, whose voices, hands, shapes, or grins had left him tugging himself off at night, or else crossing his arms over his chest and trying to stifle the heat of want, outgrow it, unlearn it, be something different than what he is. The latter he doesn’t do anymore; the former he refuses, on principle, to do on account of the Bull. It’s not a race issue, though early on he’d tried to make it into one, nor is it an objection based on personality. Dorian has fantasized about or, worse, bedded plenty of men who he’d found perfectly repugnant as soon as they’d used their mouths for less pleasant pursuits, like talking. In Tevinter the pickings were slim and they hadn’t bulked up much since he’d left, considering his status as a pariah at worst and a mysterious loner type at best.

It’s the mere fact that Bull clearly _wants_ Dorian to fantasize about him that he won’t. The provocative remarks, the innuendos, which Dorian had at first wrongly prejudged as taunts, he now understands more accurately as a sort of tease. He propositions him in such a forthright way, in the full audible range of more or less everyone they know, making it impossible for Dorian to accept without making a spectacle of himself, thus forcing him to demure, take the offer and turn it into a joke, and sulk back to his quarters to think on the words, the low knowing grunt with which they’re spoken, and absolutely not jerk himself off.

The only way to get Bull to make good on his advances is to approach him with that purpose in mind, and ask specifically for what, exactly? “Alright, hold me down and fuck me, and best make it as rough and demoralizing as you can, I won’t waste time on anything less.”

It’s one thing to fall to the clutches of the savage when he ambushes you bodily and pins you to the wall, or the ramparts, or something else suitably degrading but still out of the direct view of the public—that’s the stuff of teeth-grit, eyes shut, muscle clenching fantasy. It’s something else altogether to formally request that he do as much, looking him in his one eye and trying to use simple words to get across as quickly and painlessly as possible what you want done. 

The fantasy is easier; it’s all pleasure, and no fear—even if, perhaps, the idea of fear is conducive to the fantasy. The fantasy doesn’t question him, it doesn’t think less of him, or objectify him in any way that he doesn’t design it to, and it certainly doesn’t mock his taste in beverages. 

“Abyssal Peach? Sounds like it hurts.”

The feel of the Bull’s hand is familiar, and he braces for the thud on instinct. It’s not just he who is favored with the gut-rocking back-slap, although the idea that he was had tickled his spine once or twice, contributing to the fantasy. The Inquisitor is the most common recipient, and she bears the discomfort like she was born a sovereign instead of hastily stuffed into the regalia of one and told to play along. The touch doesn’t last very long, but it’s no glancing blow, either. Dorian feels it.

The Bull picks up the bottle with which Dorian has been filling his cup by turns, as would do any person who wasn’t raised by a barbarian horde, and takes a long and apparently disappointing swig. He looks at the bottle once he’s done and sloshes around what little he’s left. “Is this thing even on? How much do you have to drink of this shit to start feeling something?”

Dorian turns slowly and blinks at him. “Well, now I’ll never get to find out, will I?” He glances at the pitcher-sized flagon that Bull sets down on table beside him, apparently having taken Dorian’s verbal acknowledgment as an invitation to sit. “And what are you cleansing the palette with tonight? Dragon piss, as usual?”

Bull grins, maneuvering his bulk into the seat opposite Dorian’s. “Have some. It’ll cheer you up.”

“Who’s said I need cheering?”

“Oh, right, sorry. It’s been so long since I drank by myself in a poorly lit corner that I forgot how fun it was.”

Dorian raises his eyebrows. “Maybe I’m waiting for someone.”

Without seeking permission, Bull reaches over and dumps some of the contents of his flagon into Dorian’s empty glass. “You’ve sure been waiting a long time. I think you got stood up." 

Dorian squares his shoulders and asks, with as much casual disinterest as he has at his command, “Been watching me?”

If he’s hoping to be met with the same level of discretion, he’s obviously been praying to the wrong gods, because the Bull just shrugs and says, candidly, “Sometimes. Only when you’re around and there’s nothing too life threatening going on. I don’t, like, follow you to the library, or anything. Well, okay, a couple times, but only because you look nice from behind.”

Dorian stutters slightly as the fantasy squirms in the low, locked place where he keeps it during polite conversation, if this can be called that. “I—quite.” He takes a long breath. “Well, I know the word for ‘no’ in Tevene, and of course, the common tongue, but I don’t recall the Qunlat. Would it help you if I learned it?”

He thinks he’s being clever. He thinks what he’s doing is getting a manageable hold on his dignity in a conversation that’s sure to have him grappling with it. It’s uncomfortable, but the discomfort stirs him in ways that good clean solitude never could.

The Bull is quiet for a moment, and Dorian is looking strategically elsewhere, so he doesn’t follow the shift in tone when the Bull says, “You’re saying no?”

“In as many languages as I can.” That’s as close as Dorian will come to open flirtation.

From the look Bull gives him, however, he’s misread something. “Alright,” he says, and stands.

It’s a rollicking good time, isn’t it? All the subtle social cues and perfectly timed segues of his youth, and he can’t manage to navigate the slightest of interpersonal communication without losing the thread of it within the first drink. Thanks, Mother. Thanks, Father.

“Where are you going?” he calls after Bull’s back, pulling a voice that he doesn’t intend but that comes out anyway. Petty, insufferable boy not getting what he wants.

If the other patrons in the pub glance over, they don’t glance long. The width of Bull’s shoulders pauses in the direct path of one of the torches, bending the light to his shape and gilding the edges of him orange, the rest left an indistinct silhouette. He turns slowly and maybe it’s the infernal swill Bull’s poured him, maybe definitely, but Dorian’s glad he’s not going, even if it means he’ll have to sit there and look him in his big bovine face and admit to that fact.

“Leaving you be,” the Bull says, simply. “Is that not what you want?” He doesn’t sound cocky, nor does he seem to be congratulating himself on having gotten Dorian to show his hand, but he sure as nug-shit knows the answer to the question he’s asking. He just wants to make Dorian say it.

He can flee the home country, pledge himself to an elf, and spend weeks at a time sweating across cracked ground with only two feeble changes of clothes, splashing darkspawn innards on himself and his compatriots, and bear it all with nothing but a few small odor-concealing incantations and a surly complaint or two, but this, this speaking honestly about what he thinks and likes and wants, this he cannot do. Should he bother thanking Mother and Father, or is this something he ought to have taught himself by now, regardless of stilted upbringing? 

 _“I don’t want you to leave me be,”_ isn’t that hard, shouldn’t be, but the words don’t form, he doesn’t speak that language, and instead all that comes out is, “What does it matter what I want? Isn’t that your whole schtick? Hold me down and conquer me, big muscles, Qunari cock, etcetera. You’re really not living up to your image, The Iron Bull.”

The Bull moves back to hulk over the table, dwarfing Dorian in his shadow. “That’s the point of the image.” He looks at, perhaps examines, him for a long moment, the lull in their conversation allowing the layers of talk to filter in from around them, from the low uneasiness of the sober, to the triumphant rowdiness of the drunk, to the depressive slur of those suffering the indignity of being cut off and ordered to bed.

Dorian stares back unflinchingly and imagines that he looks devilishly alluring, or some equivalent rot, in this light.

Bull’s lips quirk at the edges. He’s obviously seen whatever sign he’d been looking for, and retakes the seat across from Dorian. “I notice you said Qunari cock.”

Dorian’s jaw twitches with the discomfort that jumps a level over his pride, momentarily overcoming it, and he drains his glass in order to preserve the equality of the two. “It’s no wonder you’re Hissrad. Your perceptive abilities are a marvel to behold.”

Bull’s expression lightens by the moment. He obviously enjoys being rejected, rebuffed, and insulted. If he didn’t, he’d hardly stick around, nevermind what Dorian wants or doesn’t want.

“I’ve never said a thing to you about Qunari cock,” he points out.

Dorian shrugs, making the action look far less measured than it is. “A bit of creative embellishment on my part. My sincerest apologies for misrepresenting you. It’s a bit implicit though, isn’t it?” And then to ensure that the subject isn’t pursued further, in a way that he can’t control it, he quickly follows with, “Pour me a bit more of that awful stuff, will you?”

Yes, brilliant. Have the savage get him drunk enough that he’ll do or say something regrettable and then have to face it, mortified and queasy, in the morning. With plans like these, it’s a surprise they haven’t made him strategic advisor to the Inquisitor.

Bull frowns slightly. He obviously reads the intention—why else do people drink but to make themselves be and do what they wouldn’t otherwise—but he pours the drink anyway, as requested. “So, just so that I’m clear, you’re not saying no?” 

Dorian rolls his eyes. “What, do you want it in writing? Want me to draft out some documentation that we can both sign, stating that I don’t and never have interpreted your remarks as any form of harassment beyond the usual sort between the plucky gang of misfits that the Inquisitor surrounds herself with, nor have I ever found your preoccupation with sexualizing me genuinely threatening or ever feared that you might debase me in some way if I was unwilling. I haven’t a quill handy, but I’m sure we can rouse one from Cabot.”

He makes a show of looking around for the bartender.

The Bull doesn’t blink, sustains his grin. The firelight makes the scars across his face shin white. “I know you’re fucking around, but I gotta tell you, clear communication has never done anything to make sex worse.”

“And I suppose you’re certain that sex is where this is going?” Dorian asks, swishing the liquid in his cup just to have somewhere else to look.

“If you play your cards right.”

He almost laughs at that. He refuses to be anything remotely close to charmed, and yet. “I’d rather just fold, thanks.”

“You will,” Bull says, “but that comes later." 

Dorian likes that too much. The low drawl of his voice, the look in his eyes, the nerve of him. It’s something that might be annoying if Dorian hadn’t any sexual organs, but he has, so it just makes him pleasantly warm.

“Awfully self-assured,” he says, “for someone who had resigned himself to rejection not five minutes ago.”

The Bull tilts his head to the side, bemused. “That wasn’t resignation, that was respect.”

Dorian pauses, more thrown off by the remark than he’d be by any dirty word or lecherous turn of phrase. “Oh, _please do_ teach me a lesson about respect. Don’t forget to quote the Qun.” It comes out more unpleasant than he means it to.

Bull is, mercifully, hard to offend. “I’d be as likely to preach the Qun to you as you’d be to sing me Tevinter’s national anthem,” he says.

“To be fair, I wouldn’t sing anything.” 

They look at each other over their cups, the gravity of Bull’s indulgence towards him sinking into Dorian like a solid weight, though it might just be his stomach rolling with too much drink and not enough food. He feels flattered, in a way that he’s supposed to be above. Being spoken to like a person instead of just parts to be enjoyed shouldn’t be an achievement, it should be an expectation. He knows that by now, and he wants to draft a note about it to the boy he’d once been, horny and frightened and trying to sate every craving at once, and send it back by way of Alexius’s time magic. 

Bull keeps right on examining him. Dorian lets himself be examined. He’s flawless, manicured and coiffed and plucked and ruffled, oiled and clean, sculpted into his own ideal. He puts himself on display. 

It’s only when Bull speaks that he realizes that’s not the kind of thing he’d been looking at. “Everybody has a line, Dorian. I’m sure you’ve noticed. I’m a pretty perceptive guy, have gotta be in this line of work, but sometimes I end up past somebody’s line without realizing it, and at the very best it’s no good for my friendships, or my working relationships. So, I’d rather ask than have to be told. I have to ask you,especially, because you’re not the type to tell the truth unless you’re made to.”

Dorian raises his eyebrows. “Are you calling me a liar?”

“Nah,” Bull says, waving a hand, “nothing so devious. Pretender is a better word. You’re always dodging around what you really mean and dressing it up in a lot of fancy vocabulary. If I can’t keep track of what’s consent and what’s not, then it makes the whole thing way more dangerous for everybody.” 

Dorian swallows at the word _consent_. He knows it, of course, but it’s so rare an occasion that he hears it spoken aloud, and even the rarer to have it directed at himself. “How about,” he says, “I let you know when you’ve said something that actually bothers me by freezing your tongue off? That should get the message across rather succinctly.”

The Bull huffs a small laugh, and Dorian can tell by the look on his face that _words_ hadn’t been all he’d been talking about, but he’s kind, in his queer brutish way, and he plays along. He sticks out his big pink cow’s tongue and wriggles it fiendishly. “Since it’s still intact, I’m gonna take that as an invitation to talk you into my bed.”

His table manners are atrocious. Dorian likes him, anyway.

“An actual bed?” He feigns a gasp. “That’s awfully sophisticated. I assumed, beast that you are, that you’d haul your conquests around to the alley behind the pub and make do.” The imagery, foul as it would be in practice, makes Dorian shaky and delighted and warm. 

The Bull looks equally as delighted. “I thought I’d start you off gentle.”

“Don’t.” Dorian’s steely and serious and a little bit proud of himself. The drink has wrung confidence from the depths of him. He takes a long gulp and sets his empty cup none too gently on the table. “Pour me another.”

Bull snorts. “You sure?”

That’s noble of him, perhaps, but Dorian mostly finds it condescending. “I’m not a child. I can handle myself. I know where my line is.”

Or, at any rate, he’s prepared to find out.

 

—

 

He’s not sure when the Chargers had arrived—the night had begun blurring in long timeless fire-lit streaks from the second cup and it hasn’t yet stopped—but he notices them when they notice him, taking up half the length of the bar counter with their craning necks and smirking glances. 

“I think you’re wanted,” Dorian tells the Bull, gesturing past his shoulder, long past nerves or any sort of care that he’ll be abandoned for more engaging company. He is engaging company. Or, perhaps more accurately, he’s drunk as a dwarf on his twelfth birthday, and can’t for the life of him recall why he is normally so frightened of speaking frankly.

“Always am,” Bull says, glancing back at his boys. “Pains of being this chiseled and good-looking.” He raises his flagon in a toast to them and they like that, of course they do, laughing and slamming their cups together and yelling something across in a mix of rowdy voices that get lost in the din between.

“You don’t want to go and say hello?” Dorian asks him, unable to leave out the honeyed note of self-satisfaction.

“That a round about way of trying to get rid of me?”

“Actually, it was a round about way of trying to get you to say that you’re far too enamored with my company to dream of withdrawing for even a moment, but if you’d like to take it as an exit line, by all means.” Dorian gestures rather more exuberantly than he intends toward the thrumming crowds of people who are not him, and feels far too sure of himself. 

The Bull breathes something of a laugh, but it fades into the jolly roar around them. “How could I leave when I know how much it’ll please you if I stay?”

“And I suppose that’s all you care about: pleasing me?” Dorian leans low against the table, chin in hand, the posture that was trained into him slackened by drink and comfort in equal measure. There is no shame in any of this.

“Right now, it’s at the top of my list. Is that not what you wanted?” the Bull asks, his eyes alight and grinning at some joke they’re both in on, both the butt of.

Dorian laughs. He’s overcome with a lightness he can’t begin to name. He can hold his drink with the best of the tavern regulars, but whatever he’s had tonight is so potent it’s like to singe his mustache. Self-control seems from this angle to be a highly overrated thing.

So, he says, “I’d rather more hoped you’d haul me over your shoulder, take me back to yours, and do something positively atrocious to me.”

The Iron Bull looks more than obliging, but the glimmer of attraction, hot and bright and feeding Dorian’s ego all that it craves so ravenously, is purposefully dimmed. “You’re serious about this, huh?”

“Are you not?”

“Course I am. Have been since the beginning, you looking like that and all,” Bull says, gesturing abstractly in Dorian’s direction, “and turning out not to be insufferable on top of it.”

“Yes,” Dorian says, beginning to feel less sure by degrees, “in a surprising twist, I’m actually quite sufferable.”

The Bull grins at him, wide and honest and foul with good will. “More than. You’re a great guy, Dorian. Funny, charming, smart. You can hold your own and then some in battle. You even make that mustache work, which takes an unreal sort of talent.”

“Backhandedness notwithstanding,” Dorian says, breezily as he can, “all this flattery makes it sound as if you’re about to let me down easy.” 

The Bull’s expression quirks with unacceptable gentleness. “You’re drunk.” 

“So are you.” 

“You’re drunker. Like, a lot drunker.” Not goading, not cruel, just simple fact. “I didn’t even really think you’d want to fuck me tonight. I knew you would eventually. Well, I figured. Knew is—sounds creepier than I’m trying to sound.” 

Dorian feels suddenly such a fool that he’s not sure that he can speak. To have asked, consciously and aloud, for things which shame forbids him from acknowledging in most waking hours of his life, and to be refused so casually, as if his gall means nothing—it’s. It makes the tips of his fingers smolder. 

“If you didn’t think we’d fuck,” he says stiffly, jaw clenched, “then what have you been doing here for the past several hours?”

The Bull appears unaffected by his obvious outrage. “Does ‘getting to know you’ sound too cheesy? It does, doesn’t it.” The look he gives Dorian is disgustingly—disgustingly—it’s disgusting. “I’ve been flirting. Buttering you up. Getting you hot under the collar for me so that you’ll go to bed hard, wake up hard, and remember how I was looking at you when you jerk off. Making it so that you understand what I want from you, and then putting the reins in your hands, so that you can ask for it whenever you feel ready.”

It should sound more patronizing than it does. Dorian stares him down and the Bull meets the vitriol with casual fondness. It makes Dorian’s pulse beat too fast and his face grow warm. Hot under the collar, indeed. And, for what? Being coddled. Thanks very much, but his tastes tend to involve quite the opposite. 

“Well, I’m asking now,” he grits out, subjecting himself, he knows, to further humiliation. 

“And I’m saying no.” 

Dorian swallows. “What if I don’t ever ask again?”

“Just my sorry luck, in that case.” The Bull shrugs, as if it’s just that simple.

Dorian stands, his chair scraping the floor, deepening the lines of wear already made by so many other indignant patrons on so many other late nights, fleeing the respective scenes of their abasement: a lost game of wicked grace, a drink thrown in one’s face, an insult leveled at one’s mother. Funny, the things that people find so particularly objectionable. Funny, that he’s so very unable to accept a refusal when any other hour of any other day he’d let it pass right through him, touching nothing.

He stumbles to the door, knocking hip to shoulder into Varric on the way, grunting an apology, and escaping outside with a bubbling laugh of, “Watch who you’re stepping on, you great lush!” following him.

The air is crisp, the cold now familiar, perfectly endurable with his skin as warm as it is. The walls look larger than usual, the towers blacker. Everything is overgrown, dramatized by his own perception. The Bull appears beside him, the noise from inside the Herald’s Rest rising out of the periphery for a moment as the door opens, then sapping back to echoes as it falls closed. Dorian’s pleased. He’d been expecting pursuit and he has not been disappointed.

He leans back against the bricks, letting his eyes fall closed. “Look—and you must not repeat this, especially not back to me later when I’m not so very drunk as you insist, because it is sure to make me very cross with you—but the reason I’m this sloshed is because I know that if I’m not, I can’t. I couldn’t ask for this. I couldn’t do it.”

“If you need to drink a ton to do something,” Bull says, not sounding particularly put-off, as if all the dramatics are just incidental, “you probably shouldn’t be doing it. Not yet, anyway. We’ll work up to it.” 

Oh, will they? Quite an assumption. To think that Dorian will come knocking on his door, night after night, hoping that the Bull will finally relent and fuck him nice and brutal. He feels ill. He says, “You’ve no right to tell me what I should or shouldn’t be doing,” because he’ll feel even worse if he wakes up alone in his own bed and remembers this. 

Bull’s laugh is placating. “But I do have the right to turn you down.” There’s that abominable gentleness again. “Consent goes both ways, buddy.”

Dorian opens his eyes, lets them focus, though all he sees are Bull’s tiny scars, lit yellow in the torchlight. It’s a terribly odd thing for him to say. As if, as if Dorian could—well, with magic, perhaps, but that would be—and certainly not in this state. But it—it puts them on the same level, doesn’t it? Dorian doesn’t want to fuck him when he’s sober, Bull doesn’t want to fuck him when he’s—well, drunk may be a slight understatement.

It makes the hairs on Dorian’s arms stand on edge, to be spoken to like this. 

“You’re a strange beast, aren’t you?” he breathes out.

The Bull takes the question rhetorically, but something in the crinkle around his eye tells him he likes it. “You want me to walk you back to your room?” he asks.

Dorian shakes his head, pushing off of the wall. “I’m perfectly capable, thank you. Or, anyway, I’m incapable of suffering the further indignity of being chastely escorted home. I’ll be fine.”

Bull doesn’t look like he particularly believes him, but he doesn’t push the issue, and that’s—well. If Dorian remembers it in the morning, he’ll like him all the more for it. If he doesn’t, so much the better.

 

—

 

The ground and the ceiling play fast and loose with their respective locations, and Dorian’s head throbs though the morning. He doesn’t rise, wash, and dress until the tail end of the afternoon, and the sun is dropping below the horizon by the time he makes it out of his chambers. In the library, Sister Leliana glances up from her table spread of furious handwritten notes and sprawling, unfinished maps with barely an expression and murmurs, in her low voice meant for secrets, “You look ghastly.”

He’s hardly up for it, but he cannot refuse an opportunity to exert himself upon someone, even in this state. “The Maker doesn’t bless with both hands, Sister. While I was allotted perfect bone structure and a profile to make Andraste herself quiver, I have the liver of a mere mortal, and it sometimes is overcome by life’s more punishing indulgences.”

The corner of her mouth quirks, and all that he hears for a time is the scratch of her quill, the shifting of papers: familiar noises that he has long been conditioned to take comfort in. First in his father’s study when he was a boy, and later on, sitting with Alexius, or across the room from him, saying nothing to one another but the odd exclamation at research rewarded. Droll, perhaps, but not surprising that most everything he had once treasured has been degraded in some way. This library is just the latest safe place. He wonders, idly, when and how it will sour, or if it will at all. 

Leliana’s pen stills. She looks up at him, as if she now has attention to spare. “He came by looking for you, earlier.”

The tiny pulsing headache between Dorian’s eyebrows flares for a moment, despite the potions he’d taken to dull it down. “Oh? You’ll have to be more specific. I do get so many gentleman callers.”

She raises her eyebrows and says nothing else, until Dorian relents, sighing theatrically. “Well, what did he say?”

Leliana doesn’t even bother glancing up at him this time. “He said nothing, he just looked.”

 

—

 

Shame is a burning bright red gutless feeling. Dorian had at one point been very intimately acquainted with it. He knows the taste, the tingle, the rage, the frustration, the urge to destroy a moment, a piece of oneself, an experience. He knows it like an incantation. He knows it backwards and forwards.

He knows this isn’t it.

He skulks the shadowed outskirts of the training grounds where the Bull’s Chargers usually thrash one another, and tries to decide what it is he’s actually feeling, other than slightly nauseous. He very well could have continued on as he had planned, not come here, not acknowledged the events of the previous night at all, but found some other occupation for himself, a distraction, an undemanding trifle upon which to focus his mind. In a week’s time, perhaps mentioned it to the Bull in passing, like a triviality that had escaped his remembrance until then. _How perfectly hilarious, what asses we made of ourselves. Let’s never do it again, yes?_  

When the Bull sees him, he looks pleasantly surprised, and holds up a hand in greeting from across the yard. Dorian feels too ill to be wry and casual at present, so he simply returns the gesture, leaning against the stone wall at his back and letting his eyes close briefly, then open, refocus.

It’s several more minutes before the Chargers disperse, and another few until Bull finishes up his conversation with Krem, sending him off with a backslap to knock his spine out of place.

“I wanted to apologize,” Dorian says, when it’s just the two of them, across a wide space of grass that the Bull closes by degrees. It’s dark already. Night comes on with severity at around six o’ clock in this part of the world. Just another thing he’s become accustomed to.

Bull stops a few feet from him, within comfortable auditory range, but needlessly precautionary. “Apologize?” he repeats, as if it’s a difficult concept.

“Apologize.”

The word sits between them, deteriorating from a sentiment into a collection of sounds the more that it’s repeated. Bull tilts his head, as if reviewing the sounds, reviewing him. Dorian feels no more uneasy than he has all day, and in this situation there is a thrill mixed in with the self-disgust, altering the shape of things inside of him. He had come out here because the thrill had suggested it.

“You think I was really offended by you propositioning me over and over again?” the Bull asks at length, voice light with mirth that Dorian understands to be a calculated, if well-meant, affectation. “It was great! You just weren’t in any state for it. It happens.” He waves it out of the way with his large hand. Hand that looks brutal, but isn’t always.

Dorian must be admiring him very obviously, because after a beat Bull twists a grin onto his face and murmurs, taking a step closer, “I’m down to go now, if you are.”

Dorian chokes out a little laugh. “Don’t be absurd,” he says, without any force, because he knows that absurdity is the whole intention. “I can barely stand up.”

“You don’t have to stand,” Bull says, then grins too wide, too merry, pressing himself into kindly shapes so as to make the situation easier. “I’m kidding. Well, not really, but I can make it a joke for your sake. You want to talk about it?” 

Ah, there it is. Lull him down, then go for the throat.

“What would I possibly have to talk about?” Dorian replies. He plays this role without even meaning to. He doesn’t remember everything he’d said last night, but he remembers quite keenly throwing a fit because Bull wouldn’t fuck him, remembers attempting to get off by himself when he’d found his way to his bed, and falling asleep cock in hand, mouth tasting of bile and Bull’s throat-bleeding drink.

The Bull shrugs. “The fact that you can’t talk about it, unless you’re drunk.”

Dorian heats in a quick, unruly sort of way, suddenly struck with the remembrance of saying something very similar out loud and into Bull’s face. He swallows, rolls his eyes, tries to act bored but he’s not so impeccable today, and his discomfort must show bright and ugly. “I’m perfectly capable, thank you. It’s not that I can’t, I just very much don’t want to.”

“What do you want?” Bull asks, and the words are overtaking. He takes a few steps closer to Dorian, his strategy shifting quickly away from blunt honesty and into something more convincing. “Want me to take you back to mine? Make you tea? Jerk you off really gentle-like, get you squirming,”—

“Not just now, thanks.” Dorian’s voice is raspier than the hangover alone can account for. The flush creeps lower, and he knows exactly what’s being done to him, exactly what he’s looking for.

That is why he’s here, isn’t it? In part, of course, because he had wanted to clear the air, to make an embarrassing situation less so by confronting it head on. But the rest of him, the bits that haven’t developed beyond the attention-seeking child shooting sparks from his fingers at dinner, is here to balm his scorched pride, assure himself that he is, in fact, desired and desirable, the virtual fantasy come true of any man so inclined, Qunari or otherwise, and that he cannot be refused.

“I’ll suck it,” Bull breathes at him, voice low. “Get rid of the headache real easy. Let you go to sleep after. You’ll feel better.” He reaches out, tipping Dorian’s chin up with just a press of his thumb. 

He had been refused last night. It thrums through him, the shame, the delicacy. Bull is unlike the men that Dorian is used to. He had been insulted at the time of the refusal, and he still is, a bit, but it’s overshadowed by a strange arousal at denial, and—something else, something he can’t name.

He swallows. “Is that what you want? Sounds less like a sexual encounter and more like a service.” 

“Is there a big difference?” Bull asks, and there might be some Qun bleeding into that reasoning, but the point isn’t worth arguing. “I like you, I’d consider you a friend, and I want to help you out. I’m not selfless. You’re hot. I want you to sleep in my bed. I want you to wake up in my bed. I want you to get used to being in my bed, and climb into it when you’re not so inebriated that you don’t even really know it’s me, and slide onto my big,”—

“Fasta vass. Alright, stop.” Dorian’s voice isn’t as steady as he wants it to be, but then he likes that. Likes being set off his axis, with the broad shape of the Bull hulking over him promisingly, backing him to the wall.

“You really want me to stop?” he asks, but there’s none of last night’s dead-halt in it. His voice stays low and thrumming. He’s more sure of the situation.

Dorian blinks. “I—no, not really.”

Bull smiles at him, tickled by his honesty. “So, then why do you say it?”

“You know why.”

The space between them is warmed by their breath. Dorian’s not drunk and the confidence he feels is quiet, contained, not a rapid waving bright thing but a slim shard of something. He couldn’t have done this two days ago. He would have just walked away, quick and composing himself, and waited until he was alone to revel in the possibilities. He’d made such a fool of himself the night before, but the Bull isn’t laughing and that feels like tacit validation of his desires—even if, logically, he knows the only validation he needs is his own.

After a good long stare, Bull adjusts his posture so that he’s standing back a little, not so encroaching, not so big, and says, “I have some ideas, but you’d know better than I would. Whatever issues you’ve got, they’re not a big deal. Just don’t let them fester. Sort that shit out.”

“In the grand tradition of well-meant advice,” Dorian says, carefully, trying to acknowledge the second, veiled, layer to that remark, “that’s rather more easily said than done.”

Bull shrugs. “So, it’s not easy, maybe. Not that hard. I’m sure you’ve done harder things. I’ll help you, if you want. Talk to you, when you need talking to.” 

“That’s not—talk’s not exactly what I’m after from you.” Another lie, but not a convincing one. 

“Cock, not talk?” Bull winks his one eye. 

“Oh, for the love of the Maker.”

It’s unfathomable that Dorian is at all attracted to him, but there it is, pulsing, weighty and growing by the second, a sort of dim euphoria that compounds arousal with something more substantial, something that will go unspoken and unacknowledged until it’s wrung out of him by at least one good orgasm. 

“I’m fully capable of both,” Bull says, “but it’s whatever you want.”

And it’s not as if no one has ever said that to him before, it’s just a line— _whatever you want, pretty boy_ —but it feels literal in this context, as if he could ask for anything and be given it, and that’s—it makes him—well, it stokes one’s fires, doesn’t it?

 

—

 

It hadn’t been an empty promise; Bull does make him tea.

The kettle starts whistling when Dorian is laid on his back on the Bull’s unsurprisingly lumpy mattress—“Yeah, yeah,” he says, when Dorian complains, “Lyanna from the kitchens says the same thing, but she always comes back,”—with the Bull’s horns brushing his thighs, mouth on his cock, thumb tickling the underside of his knee. Once the whistle rises to a scream, Bull pulls off with an encouraging wet noise and withdraws to clang the spout of the iron pot against the rims of two cups.

“I don’t want tea anymore,” Dorian mumbles, unable to watch, or focus on anything but the one spot on the ceiling that he’s been making sweet optical love to for the last ten minutes, timing his breaths, trying to keep his hips from shifting up into the soft touches, soft hands, breath warm and always on the edge of devolving into a laugh.

“It’s mint,” Bull tells him, the bed dipping with his weight, the clink of cups on the night table, steam and body heat merging to heighten the itch. Dorian is impatient, strung taut, bleary with desire, and the look the Bull gives him when Dorian dares a glance is one of pure enjoyment, as if this is all he wants to be doing: offering refreshments to a half-naked man who won’t make eye contact. 

Dorian swallows, sits up, looks at his pants around his calves and feels one of the loosened outer buckles on his vest shift. He’s hardly been ravaged, more like mildly mussed, but his breath comes too sharply and his cock is so much harder than it ought to be from just the tease he’s been given. He leans down to finish unlacing his boots, somewhat defiantly, and Bull watches him, mutters something in Qunlat that Dorian knows no translation for.

“What was that?” he asks, feeling the attention like a solid thing, letting it curl along his spine and up his bare shoulder.

“Patience,” Bull says. “Literally it would be, I guess, _‘in due time.’_ The underlying idea being that whatever is going to happen is going to happen and there’s no point in trying to rush it.” 

Dorian’s boot drops to the floor with a soft thud and he bends to reach the other. “I think the _point_ in this instance would be that if you don’t hurry up I’m going to light you on fire.” He glances up quickly, feeling the faux pas slip out, tries to retrieve it before it spoils—what? Something good. “Empty threat. I wouldn’t actually use magic on you. No need to fret.”

“I was on the edge of fretting,” Bull says, with placating humor, watching Dorian’s second boot fall to the floor. He reaches out, runs a slow hand up his thigh, tugs lightly, too lightly, on his dick and smiles at his face. “You’re pretty.”

Dorian lets himself fall onto his back, closing his eyes and humming agreeably, like it’s absolutely nothing to him, like it’s expected. “Aren’t I, though?”

Bull likes that. His fist tightens and he pulls Dorian’s pants the rest of the way off of his legs with his other hand. He leans down, licks the head of Dorian’s cock, then sucks him in so fast and so deep that it’s—more than—it’s—oh. That feeling, known but not recently, not something he’s used to by any measure these days, overcoming, engulfing, wild hot and unable to be examined, quantified, understood as anything but pleasure, warm pleasure, bright pleasure, something to lose oneself in and not think on. 

The Bull pulls up, and off, and looks at him and Dorian has to think on it.

“Are you this frustratingly careful with everyone you fuck?” he bites out, harsh and ill-composed. 

Bull brushes his finger pads along Dorian’s hip. “Only people who I can tell need it.” 

That jabs a little in the wrong places.

“Oh, please,” Dorian tells him, breath hitching when the hand falls back to tickle the head of his cock. “Might you be more condescending? As if you know what I need better than—ah—I do.” Fast, wet strokes, building frenzy, delight on Bull’s face when Dorian’s head tilts back, shoulder’s slouching.

“Alright,” he says, “then tell me what you need.” Just like that. Strange place, strange times. 

It’s all very well, chock full of respect and similar good intentions, but an invitation doesn’t make it any easier for Dorian say it, to ask for something vile, something that would curl ugly on his tongue and make him feel so overwhelmingly foul. He needs a drink. Tea is all of useless to him, which he supposes, upon quivering, dizzied reflection, had probably been the point.

“I,” he begins, as Bull’s hand slows, gaze locked on Dorian’s face. “Kaffas.” He reaches out, grabs Bull’s other hand and brings it to his hip, presses down on the fingers with his own so that the nails dig into his skin, and writhes a little bit inside. “That.”

The Bull nods, like he knows. Of course he knows. Dorian has been awfully transparent.

He leans down, doesn’t lift his hand or let up on the pressure in his fingers, and growls in that terribly unfair voice of his, “Rough and mean, yeah? You wish I would bruise you up. I know what you see when you look at me. I know what you want from me, what kind of fetish object I am.” Dorian can hear the grin in his voice. He’s practically cooing. “Big hands, Qunari cock, muscles and weapons and all that blood.”

Dorian winces. Bull pulls back a little, head tilting.

“But you don’t like the blood, huh? Hits too close.” With some effort, Dorian nods. “That’s okay. No blood.” Bull pulls that great hand of his from Dorian’s hip up to cup his chin, lifting his jaw, fingers brushing his lips. “But you wanna get wrecked, right? Nobody comes to me who doesn’t wanna get a little bit wrecked.”

By some, probably purposeful, miracle, Dorian’s pride is still wholly intact, and even being toyed with as he is, he still has it in him to grunt, “I do believe you came to me first.” 

Bull laughs, sounds startled, sounds pleased. “Yeah, well. I wanna get wrecked, too.”

Dorian doesn’t know how to parse that remark. He feels his knees being spread, feels Bull’s hands on the rest of his buckles, the clang of veridium, slap of leather, mixed sensory information that only makes him ache better. 

Bull says as he finishes undressing him, “Anything you don’t like, you tell me. Or you use a watchword. You got a watchword?”

Dorian finds that unreasonably funny. “Heavens, no.”

Bull doesn’t. “You wanna make one up? I got a few suggestions. Foreign words are best, something that wouldn’t come up normally. Maybe something in Tevene?” Three straps down, then four, then he’s out. Bull lifts him at his lower back and swipes his very dashing ensemble out from under him and tosses it on the back of the one lonely chair in the room.

Dorian reunites with the spot on the ceiling that he so likes. “ _Saarebas_. How about that?”

The beat that passes without sound makes him look back at Bull again, who’s frowning slightly, still and curious. “That’s kinda twisted." 

“I’m kind of twisted.” Dorian smiles. He likes to shock, to amaze, to disgust, in a way. He’s not some delicate thing in need of gentle handling. He’s an adult. He knows what he wants, he just—he doesn’t have enough practice acknowledging it. “Anyway,” he says, reaching to stroke his own dick with gall he’s just invented for himself, “I’ve always found the word rather flattering. Dangerous thing. I am one. Remember that, when you’re wrecking me.”

The grin that splits the Bull’s face is slow and encompassing. It’s then and only then that Dorian realizes that Bull believes, in some mangled, libido-clouded misconstruction of the truth, that he is getting very lucky.

“Wouldn’t dare forget,” he grunts, then grabs Dorian by the wrist, yanking him away from touching himself, and flips him with very little effort onto his stomach. Presses down on his back, pulls his hair, makes it _hurt_. 

Dorian grins, too.

 

—

 

The first time he gives it to him how he asks, brutal and degrading, fingers digging into his hips, teeth marking his neck, cock, well slicked and carefully controlled as it is, just short of breaking him in half. It hurts and it hurts and it hurts until the euphoria takes over, melts it all into a blessing, a chant, and the parts of him that wince it away and cradle it in shame are washed clean. Bull stares him down and tells him he’s a mess, and it’s with a pure sort of adulation. In the heat of it, Dorian asks Bull to slap him, and he does. It hurts too much, enrages, so he hits him back, but Bull just wraps his wrists in a one-handed grip and fucks him harder, and that makes him giddy, makes him come so hard he can’t move for minutes after.

The second time is the opposite. Not half an hour later and Bull fingers him open, slow and gentle, and kisses him in this overwhelmingly frail way. Dorian realizes, in the middle of it, that it’s the first time they’ve kissed and he feels dirty and clean all at once. Bull mumbles in his ear about watching him stumbling drunkenly away from the tavern last night and wondering how he managed to still look so wildly manicured, smell so good even with liquor on his breath. How he laughs in the heat of battle, even when he’s terribly frightened. How he’s kind, in his secret ways, and how the first thing Bull thought when he saw him in the Chantry at Redcliffe was of the six different ways that he could kill him, if need be, and the second thing was an errant consideration that if he turned out to in fact be an ally, it would be nice to have him around, if only to look at.

“Ha,” Dorian breathes, blurred with exhaustion and numb pleasure, “to be sure. But I’m more than just nice to _look_ at, aren’t I?” He presses his hips up, expects to be told how good he fucks, how good he squirms and pleads.

Bull just strokes his hair and says, “Yeah, turns out you’re good company, too,” and that breaks Dorian open more than any nasty thing could. 

The third time is his idea. Bull makes him drink his tea first, gone cold, served in tiny cups on tiny saucers that look ridiculous in the Bull’s oversized hands. They talk about the last scouting mission they’d been on, out in the Western Approach, something viciously impressive that Cole had done with a knife, about Lavellan with blood all over her face, limping toward them, yelling, “Alright, lads?” with this teeming battle-lust that she hadn’t always had. About how things are likely to get far worse before they get better.

He rides the Bull, and has to listen to a string of unrepentant and unfunny jokes about it, touching the scratches on his face, his chest, and mumbling, “I feel as if there’s an ugly story behind each of these that I want to hear in gratuitous detail.”

Bull pulls his hair, not too hard, but not so gently, either. “You’re right. You are a little twisted,” and fucks up into him so fast, so well, deteriorating him, untwisting him, taking all of the justifications and fears and indecisions and silencing them, setting them free.

It’s just one night. It’s not going to fix anything especially, but it’s a good night.

 

— 

 

The trek to the Exalted Plains is long, close-quartered, and exhausting. He’s granted the mercy of female traveling companions, at least, which minimizes the degree of odor by quite a margin. It’s not that he’s averse to the scent of male sweat, but when it’s compounded for weeks on end and thickened with blood and piss and anything else that a quick dip in a stream can’t quite wash out, it loses its attractive musk and takes on a stomach-turning quality. Not that Sera smells sweet as a rose, on the road or off, but she’s a far sight preferable to sleep beside than Blackwall’s dirt-encrusted beard. On their last trip to the Fallow Mire, Dorian’s almost sure a small pond creature had started living in it.

He and Sera share a tent, because although Cassandra trusts them both more than she once had, she’s not overly keen on either of them as a bedfellow. Maybe it’s the wink Sera gives her. Maybe it’s the tiny flame that Dorian lights in his hand to read by in the dark.

“You’re going to burn the whole campsite down, Magey,” Sera tells him, when they’re tucked into their furs on opposite sides of the tent, putting as much space between one another as they can. “Put it _out_.”

Dorian snaps his hand closed, hoping the expression of withering distaste he aims at her is visible for at least a moment before all goes dark. “You do know there’s great big version of that flame right outside this very tent, flickering away, don’t you? Much more like to kill us all in our sleep.”

“Lucky for me you’re closest to it then, innit?” 

Dorian glares at nothing visible. He’s prepared to sleep, anyhow, drained of all will to tease or be teased, or argue the fundamentals of elemental magic. As soon as his eyes fall closed, however, Sera asks, bouncy as ever, “Hey, so is it true that you went cock and bull, then? Because I heard,”—

Dorian’s shoulders stiffen. “Excuse me? Did I what?”

“You know.” Sera makes some indistinct gesture in the dark that he assumes he is lucky not to be able to see. “Did you ride Horny’s horse-cock? Get a peek under the harness, and all.” 

Dorian doesn’t know what expression to make. “That’s absolutely the most appalling thing you could have said.”

Sera snorts. “Yeah, well, that’s what the kitchen girls call it. Now those are some dirty birdies. You’d have to plug your ears if you ever went down for a sniff at the stew, fancy-boy. Not like I’m looking to hear about so-and-so’s cock or what he can do with it, but when girls with knockers like that talk, I listen. And anyway, Skinner told me she’d seen you and Bull messing about at the Rest, and,”—

“Who?” Dorian asks, maintaining, he’d like to note, an indisputable evenness in his tone.

“Uh, the Iron Bull. Big guy, Qunari, quite the goer. Don’t play coy.”

Dorian rolls his eyes. “Yes, yes, I know, I mean who shared with you this very reputation-marring information?”

“Oi, Skinner? You don’t know Skinner? She’s one of Bull’s boys, you really ought to know her. Black hair, city elf—not so elfy as all that, never praying to Elgarnanan or whoever—good fun if you get a few drinks in her. She likes to skin people.” 

“I’m sure I never would have guessed.”

“Right, well she mentioned last we got rowdy together that she’d seen you and Bull getting handsy a couple days in a row, and then he shows up late to morning practice day after, in as good a mood as any ox-man who’s just eaten his fill of Tevinter,”—

“Maker’s breath, if you finish that sentence, I _will_ light you on fire.”

He feels shaken in an odd way. Not that it matters, not that he cares in particular who knows what—it’s different here, after all, not at all like back home—but there had been a peace to secrecy. He had been off the hook. No explanations needed, no obligation to justify himself or what he wants or who he wants it from. Simply: desire felt, desire met. Bull asks questions, probes him, studies him, forms conclusions and reforms them when Dorian corrects his assumptions. He’s a quick study. His discretion is obscured by a brash persona that overwhelms, that is designed to overwhelm. He’s a spy. He’s subtler than Dorian had before realized. He’s smart.

Sera’s smart, too, in her way. He hears a rustle and sees the shape of her rise against the canvas backdrop. She’s irked him, he suspects, more than she’d wanted to.

“Settle down, princess. I’m not out to spread your dirty laundry. Didn’t say a thing in front of our lady, did I? Might make her feel weird, you two having a go at each other. Hard to keep the family together once things get incestuous.” 

Dorian tries to sound nonplussed, finds that he’s less embarrassed than he thought he’d be, finds his voice mostly even. “I think Lavellan would object more to you likening the lot of us to a family than she would anything that we may or may not do on our time, in the privacy of our own bedrooms.”

Sera’s shape shrugs. “Doesn’t much matter either way, does it? I’m rather chuffed about the whole thing, personally. You keep Bull occupied, means I get to fill the great big void he’ll leave in the barmaids and stable girls.”

“That’s lovely for you, I’m sure, but don’t get overly optimistic. I have no intention of keeping Bull, or anyone, I might add, occupied.”

“A one-off, then?”

“I,”—he’s going to say _don’t know_ , but feels extremely frivolous for even discussing it. “We’re not having this conversation, Sera.”

She sighs and falls back onto her pelts. “Alright, untwist your knickers. Just trying to gab with a pal, aren’t I? I think it’s a good thing, is all.” That’s almost touching, until she says, “You really needed to get laid.”

 

—

 

They return to Skyhold battle-wrecked, dirty, and triumphant. Josephine greets them at the gates with a barrage of information that ought to be conveyed, Dorian believes, beside a fire and with a glass of brandy in hand, but Lavellan nods, dismounts, asks relevant questions, pokes fun, and expresses no annoyance, exhaustion, or disinterest, even though she’s got a broken rib and a bruise purpling the whole left side of her face.

Dorian can barely stand. He slouches to his quarters, leaves his packed bag by the door, washes, and sleeps. There’s a reason that she’s the leader and he isn’t. She is more than her mark. 

When he wakes it’s early evening. He dresses, adjusts himself internally to a different environment—no dying soldiers sobbing their prayers to the Maker, nobody’s fresh blood on his face, no hunger, no fear, no fingers cramping from the cold—and goes to the Herald’s Rest to get himself steaming drunk. He’s not looking for Bull so much as he is looking for anyone to sit with and speak to, a familiar face. A friend, to be indiscreet about it. He has those now.

He finds Bull without looking. At the bar, with a girl in his lap. The bard, he thinks. Pretty thing, small, though everyone looks small beside Bull. He’s whispering in her ear, big ridiculous grin splitting his face. Probably saying something like, _I’ll give you something to sing about_. Making a clown of himself, charming her despite it all.

Dorian flags Cabot down, orders a drink, and slips into a spot at a table beside Varric, across from Krem and a few of the Chargers that he can’t for the life of him recall the names of. Perhaps one is Skinner.

“Welcome back, handsome,” Varric greets. “How was the trip? You bust heads and break hearts?”

Dorian smiles tightly and takes a long sip. “All in a day’s work.” 

“You were gone for half a month.” Varric’s smiling, but careful, conscious. He’s trying to ask if Dorian’s alright. He’s like that.

A short nod, a smile, his glass raised. “There were a lot of heads needing busting.”

Varric raises his glass back. The Chargers join in on the action, taking any excuse to be uproarious and drain their cups, and Dorian finds himself being toasted by a number of people who he’s hardly exchanged two words with. Krem, who he at least knows, if only through the occasional mid-battle exchange in Tevene and a couple of smarmy expressions when they catch one another’s eyes across the courtyard, doesn’t even participate in the clamor, just sits back in his chair, spreads his knees, and keeps his eyes on a scene that Dorian knows is playing itself out at the bar counter behind him.

“The chief’s a dog,” he murmurs, with obvious fondness.

“And here I thought he was a bull,” Varric says, without looking back to see what beastly thing he’s done now.

And does it matter? Krem’s looking at Dorian like he’s wondering if it matters to him. He wants a show, a slip, for whatever diabolical little reason. Maybe curiosity. Maybe he’s reporting back to the boss. Maybe Dorian’s invented levels to this exchange that aren’t present, and Krem has no idea at all that Dorian’s been in Bull’s bed. He appears, however, to at least suspect.

“We all do what we must to get by,” he puts in, eventually, to kill the strange lull in conversation, and takes a long burning drink.

 

—

 

He hadn’t been able to make himself say hello at the start of the evening, so he waits until the end of it. There is no sound coming from behind Bull’s door, no moaning, no bedsprings, but the lights are still on. Dorian knocks before he can reason himself out of it, and subtly adjusts his hair when he hears the creak of the floorboards and the shuffle of the knob.

“I know this is terribly uncouth of me, especially considering that your companion for the night may well still be present. I would loath to subject her to such horrendous awkwardness, but then I suspect that you might have exhausted her beyond consciousness by this hour and,”— 

Bull, expression shifting from confusion to enjoyment, holds up a hand. “She’s gone.” He’s wearing neither his harness nor his eyepatch, and he looks minutely off from the picture in Dorian’s head, but the outline is the same. Same shape, same voice.

He says, opening the door up wider, “I’m glad you’re back. Should have said so at the tavern but my hands were full. I would have kept them free if I’d known you were gonna wake in time to make it out for a few drinks. Or,”—he looks Dorian up and down—“more than a few.”

“You’re correct,” Dorian says, with a confidence mustered not only from alcohol, but from how surprisingly well his late night visit is being received, “I’m quite drunk, and making a fool of myself at your door.”

Bull grins and there’s something of tenderness in it. “You wanna come in and make a fool of yourself inside?”

Dorian swaggers in and the room swaggers around him. “Not too inebriated for you this time, am I?” He cares not at all for decorum in this moment.

“I didn’t say come in and take your pants off, did I?” The lights are low, Bull’s voice comes from behind him, encircles him. Everything is warm, fleeting, and of little consequence. “We’re friends. You might just be here to talk to me.”

Dorian begins unlacing his pants. “I’m not.” 

Bull snorts, doesn’t take it badly. Never takes anything badly, the great barbarian, not off the battlefield, not when it’s the two of them alone and Dorian says things he shouldn’t. “How were the Plains?” he asks, as Dorian sits down on the edge of his bed to take his shoes off. 

“Vast, dull, full of darkspawn and incompetent locals. Nothing unusual.”

“Lavellan mentioned some pretty brutal battles.” There’s a clink of dishes from the little kitchenette he keeps—for entertaining certainly, probably charms all of his conquests with his uncharacteristic collection of dawnstone tableware—and Dorian rolls his eyes at the sound of water filling a pot.

“She took the brunt of it. Always does,” he says shortly. Then, “I’m not having tea with you. I want you to choke me and fuck me against the wall.” Simple words, in this state. Simple concept. 

The Bull doesn’t blink, doesn’t stop what he’s doing. “Have something to eat, then ask me again in half an hour.” He nods at a board of bread and cheese set on the table. “Think you can wait that long?”

Dorian doesn’t acknowledge the tacit rejection, just takes it and tucks it into the place where he keeps all such unbecoming things, and asks, “Why do you have cheese?”

“I’m in good with the kitchens, aren’t I?” Bull gives him a look of utter self-satisfaction. 

Dorian rolls his eyes, feels mildly uncomfortable but tries not to. “I thought it was the bard tonight. A kitchen girl, too?”

“Kitchen boy, if you wanna be precise.” 

“Both at once?” There’s an image there that threatens, that teases. Bull is watching him like he’s waiting to see Dorian quiver with jealousy, or something equally sentimental and dull. There are edges of it, but it’s not a whole feeling. He wants Bull’s attention, and he has it in this moment. There is nothing to agonize over. He tries to make his voice loose, relaxed, but it comes out clenched and slightly mocking. “How perfectly charming. You are a very talented man.”

Bull looks at him, curious. Walks the length of the room and stands over him. He knows exactly what Dorian thinks of his exploits, but he doesn’t push the point, just reaches down and rests his blunt fingers over his throat, without pressure, a lure, a promise. He knows what Dorian wants from him.

“I’m not a man, am I?” he says, voice low and growling and edged with deprecating amusement. “I’m a beast.” 

“Yes,” Dorian breathes up at him, “you’re a beast.”

Bull does choke him and fuck him against the wall, but not before Dorian has two pieces of bread, a cup of tea, and shows Bull every last bruise and scab from his journey to the Plains, lets him touch them, lets him know when the touch starts to ache.

 

— 

 

What had started as a thrill becomes a habit, and Dorian keeps waiting for himself to grow bored of Bull or for Bull to grow bored of him, but instead things just change shape, shifting from late night blurs into slow daylight romps in Dorian’s bedroom, on his imported sea silk sheets, white winter light spilling in through shuttered windows, his colognes and powders rattling shrilly on the bureau when his headboard hits the wall. Fucking when they should be doing other things, talking when they should be fucking, going from friends with benefits to very good friends with very good benefits, and not bothering about the specifics. Dorian’s old enough not to mind. He’s busy, scattered, always tired, always arguing strategy with Cullen, or magical theory with Solas, always consulted on the Inquisitor’s private happenings, asking about the war meetings so often and consistently that she has him sit in on a few when they regard Tevinter especially, to Cassandra’s annoyance and Leliana’s tight-lipped amusement.

On one such early evening as he finds himself free of appointments and desirous of relaxation, when the sky is burnt deep orange and the soldiers are putting up a chant to Maker knows what in the courtyard below, Bull pulls out of him slowly—his gentleness after sex increasing in direct correlation to his brutality during the act itself—and murmurs into the short tufty hairs at the back of Dorian’s neck, “What do you want from me, Dorian?”

It off-sets the moment. Dorian can’t think it through. He’s boneless, skin abuzz, burning in all the right places and delirious with chemical joy. He frowns, trying to examine the remark, turning around to face Bull. “I’m getting exactly what I want from you,” he says, with a small grin that struggles to take hold.

Bull sits up, shrugging off the gravity in his expression, blinking it away. The air is so warm, the sky going grey. Dorian stands, stretches, puts on his robe. The faustian velvet tickles the marks on his back where Bull had dug his fingernails in because Dorian had asked him nicely.

After a lull, Bull asks, as if trying to be conversational, “Why don’t you fuck anyone else?”

Dorian almost laughs. It’s a strange position to be in, to hear those words, the disguised disinterest. He finds himself quite suddenly in possession of power he hadn’t known he’d had, and wonders what to do with it.

Clearing his throat, he says in a slim voice, “I am not, in fact, a man of insatiable libido. Nor am I overcome with an abundance of time for frivolity, often as I may seem to engage in it. One partner on the regular is quite enough occupation for me.” He lets the moment settle. “Why don’t _you_ fuck anyone else?”

Bull frowns. “I do,” he says, defensively.

“Not of late, if I’m to believe what I’ve heard.” Dorian walks back to him, stands at the edge of the bed and smiles most charmingly, he’s sure. “Sera says the girls in the kitchens have grown ever so frustrated. She’s, of course, looking to lend a helping hand.”

“Maybe I’ve taken up with the soldier boys now.” Bull reaches up, thumbs Dorian’s chin. He’s playing with him. “Sera wouldn’t know about that.”

“Maybe you have.”

Dorian’s sure he’s glinting in the rising evening, skin slick with drying sweat. Power is something he’d been taught to hold onto, barter with, collect, and use. It feels odd to just have it sit, unexploited, at his fingertips. Bull knows it’s there. Bull knows he’s playing a losing game. 

He rolls his eyes, gives up the pretension. “There was one, last week.” He shrugs.

It’s flattering, but not overly surprising, when Dorian really engages with it, that they have so preoccupied one another. He says, “You’ve grown awfully fond of me, haven’t you?”

“You’re taking this the wrong way.” Bull’s voice is soft, amused, vaguely searching. “Of course I’m fond of you. Always have been, even before the sex. Sex hasn’t made me like you better, knowing you better has made me like you better. They’re not the same thing, my liking you and my liking to fuck you. They’re related, maybe, but not interchangeable.”

“Right.” There’s some Qun nonsense coloring that perspective, but on the whole Dorian finds it sound. “So, what’s the problem? What do _you_ want from _me_?”

He’s got one knee on the bed, more or less looming over Bull that way Bull has so often loomed over him, examining him the way he has often been examined, but he doesn’t think he’s coming off half so benignly. He’s got none of the patience, nor the gentleness, just a sort of ecstasy of expectation, nerves, a loose grip on an upper-hand that he’s sure he doesn’t really need to hold onto. He wants to be told something: what is it? That he is treasured, that he is the favorite? Cliches.

Bull looks him up and down admiringly, smiles with mild discomfort. “It’s not about what I want.”

A different sort of cliche, then. 

“Oh, please,” Dorian says, brandishing himself, the full length of his body, speaking with more fervor than he intends. “You love to play that role, don’t you? Gentle giant, great beast of burden, subject only to my whim. Hurt me if I like, choke me if I like, bruise me if I like, but say nothing of how much you like it.” His grin isn’t kind. “I know you do. You act as if you’re doing me a favor, seeing to the poor repressed Tevinter who doesn’t know how to approach what he wants, and maybe you are, but it’s not only that. You wouldn’t do it if it were only that. You want it just as much as I do, and so the question becomes: what else do you want?”

Bull opens his mouth, then closes it again. Looks at Dorian like he’s said something that is at once hilarious and frightening. Begins again, but barely gets out a syllable before there’s a loud knock on the door. 

They look at each other, and the knock repeats, with more intent. 

“Naturally,” Dorian says.

“Could be worse. We could actually be doing it.” Bull looks relieved. How typical that it’s turned out in his favor. “You gonna get that?”

Dorian sighs with excessive melodrama, disengages from whatever teeming thing he’d been feeling in the back of his stomach, stands and tightens his robe. The knock comes again.

“Yes, alright, alright—oh. Hello.” He’d been anticipating a scribe delivering some such notes as he’d ordered, or perhaps a summons to a meeting with the Inquisitor that he’d be given time to dress and correct himself for. Finding Lavellan herself there, fist raised with intent and frowning impatiently as those short on time are wont to do, is a surprise, but not entirely an unpleasant one. There are certainly people he’s less eager to see, even in this situation. “Is this an end of the world thing, or a social call?” 

The taut line of her brow slackens, she quirks a reluctant grin, and shoves a stack of very decrepit, dust-laden books into his arms. “Why can’t it be both?” 

He struggles not to cough, or let his arms buckle. “Charmed, I’m sure, but a bottle of wine would have been wildly preferred. What are these?”

“Venatori writings, lifted off some bodies in the desert by the scouts at Griffon Wing, arrived just now with Harding. They’re in Ancient Tevene, and so I figured who better?” She frowns at his shoulder where it’s pressed to the doorframe. “More than that, I’d like to have some idea of what they say before I head out in the morning, if at all possible, and didn’t feel comfortable dumping such an utterly dismal job on any of the scribes in my employ. They think I’m a just and fair leader, you see, and I’m trying to maintain the image.”

“While I, of course, already know you for the villain you are.” His grin is stifled. “Yes, quite, it’s no problem. I’ll make a pot of tea and have a late night.” He says things he thinks he would normally say. He’s not trying to keep her out so much as he is simply not inviting her in.

She nods, gratitude implicit, and he watches her line of sight drift from his shoulder, to the sliver of the room visible behind him, to his face, and back again.

He clears his throat. He’s not so brilliant a pretender as he had once been. “Was that all?”

“There’s actually some specific chapters that I want you to focus on. I gleaned a general idea from some of the etchings, and it looks likes there’s a whole section on rift magic, that—well. I can show you, unless you’ve got better things to be doing?” Her suspicion is obvious, her voice careful, pointed. He’s not sure if she already knows what to expect. He’s not sure who knows and who doesn’t know, or if it matters.

Instinctively, he wants to dive for excuses, find some way to steer her elsewhere, some subject to catch her on, but he understands that his shame is frivolous. They’re in a war; worse things than this are happening all the time. He holds the door open, says, “Pardon the mess,” and gestures her inside.

Bull has, at least, put his pants back on, even if the sheets are still kicked to the bottom of the bed and the room smells like semen and sweat.

“Evening, boss,” he says, unmoved as ever.

Lavellan blinks at him, brow slightly raised, and then gives Dorian a look that suggests she’s restraining herself from saying something utterly comical. “Bull,” she greets, tactfully, showing nothing. “This is actually… rather convenient. I was going to search the tavern for you after this, wanted to talk specifics about tomorrow’s journey.” 

“Lovely how these things work out, isn’t it?” Dorian says too quickly, his discomfort shrill and obvious. “Wait, you’re going, too?” He looks to Bull, then back to Lavellan. “Where are you going?”

“Storm coast,” she says. “Qunari deal. Or, possible deal. We talked about this, don’t you remember?”

“I’m sure I lost track of the days.” Dorian feels himself becoming less a participant in the conversation and more a gaudy impression of himself, but he’s not sure how to stop. “I must admit my insult at not being invited.”

“Bringing along her pet Tevinter mage isn’t likely to win the Inquisitor many diplomacy points with the Ben-Hassrath,” Bull grunts.

“Well,” Lavellan says, her mouth edging up at the corner, “it seems to have gone over alright with _some_ of the Ben-Hassrath.”

Dorian just repeats, “ _Pet_?” back with vague incredulity, and Bull grins at both of them, and everything is mostly alright. He’d understood that it would be, on some level, but it isn’t until he’s actually within the crisis moment, surrounded by all the things that could go wrong, that he fully realizes that it doesn’t matter to Lavellan at all beyond bringing her an odd sort of amusement.

These are his friends, he thinks. There’s a war on, and these are his friends.

 

—

 

Dorian drinks and Varric watches him and writes tawdry descriptions of the action out loud. “A man sunk deep in his cups to escape the pain of his past, and the trepidation of his future. A man beaten by time, who beat time at its own game, and lived long enough to regret it. A man,”—

“I will pay you to stop.”

Varric’s laugh booms loud through his temples. “Gold just doesn’t sway me like it used to, I’m sorry to say.”

The whole room is dark blue and bright yellow and he sees two girls that he knows Bull has fucked twirling each other about to the music, swinging their skirts, laughing and singing the way that people with so much to fear do. They all may die, and very soon, but it doesn’t feel real now.

“I’m sleeping with the Iron Bull,” he tells Varric, after a lot of silence hangs between them and a lot of noise booms around them. Varric is scribbling in his notebook, but he looks up then, the scratch of his pen pausing.

“I know you are, charmer,” he says.

“Does everyone know?”

Dorian’s looking at the table, but he sees the shape of Varric from the corner of his eye, sees its pause and its shrug. He thinks it’s grinning. “They will once I finish my next book.”

 

—

 

When the Inquisitor returns from the Storm Coast, there is no feast thrown, no speech given, no chanting, no cheering, just the Chargers back in the tavern quieter than they had been, Cole returned to his roost along the ramparts, and the Bull’s fingers bruising Dorian’s hips. 

The bed is uncomfortable, there’s no lantern lit, and Dorian’s head keeps knocking the headboard. He’s aroused, certainly, burning in the hands on him, but he feels silent inside, as if there is no connection between him and the act itself, just a body that relates them by mere coincidence. They hadn’t even said anything to one another, he’d just knocked on Bull’s door an appropriate number of hours after news of his return had spread, and found himself pressed to the bed, encompassed, warm, and frenzied out of his clothes. 

Bull’s edging rough, but not the roughest he’s ever been. Rather, it’s something in the tone of him, in the locked set of his jaw, how he hasn’t really looked at Dorian at all. He feels as if he may well be anybody, any willing partner, that the Bull just wants someone to fuck, and that’s—well, it’s supposed to have always been that. They’re just fucking. They’re just friends. The attention he’s paid Dorian, the way he waits for him, adjusts for him, engages his trivialities, discusses his fears, holds open his wounds and licks them clean: that had been taken for granted.

“Bull,” he says, tonelessly, when he realizes that none of this is working for him, and it sounds so loud in the dark room, drowning out their labored breathing and the smack of flesh on flesh. “Bull.”

He stops, slows, still inside Dorian but not exerting pressure, mid-thrust. Dorian wonders what he would have done if he’d said _sarebaas_. Stopped more quickly, pulled out entirely, apologized? None of that is what he wants. He’s not afraid of what’s happening, doesn’t feel powerless or overextended or anything of the sort. He just wants the lights on, wants to speak to one another.

Bull breathes at him, face so close but expression indistinguishable, and swallows. “You okay?”

Dorian nods, realizes it won’t be seen, and says, “Yeah. Yes. Are you okay?”

He pushes up, braces Dorian’s hips, pulls out and sits back on his heels, kneeled between Dorian’s thighs. “Why wouldn’t I be?” There’s something asleep in his voice, a thing that’s usually wide and awake and laughing.

Dorian’s not quite sure how to answer that. “I believe I know you well enough by now to be able to tell when something isn’t right.”

“Do you?” There’s nothing flirtatious or kindly in his voice, just a blankness that edges mockery. The contrast between the Bull who had left for the coast and the one who had come back is sharp and irking. His hand falls to Dorian’s thigh, doesn’t squeeze, just grazes the skin there, intended as a distraction, an enticement, but the action is devoid of any real feeling. 

Dorian would writhe for the same touch in a different context, but here it is insulting. He is not a stranger to empty fucks, blunt fingertips, men who don’t look him in the eye. He had at one time been intoxicated by that kind of treatment, craved disinterest as much as he’d craved warm skin, a voice biting pet names into his ear, and maybe he still does in his way, but he’s old enough now to know what’s good for him and what isn’t.

“Bull, what happened?” 

Bull shakes his head, grey shape in the dark moving slow and heavy. “Don’t ask.”

“If you wanted me to stay quiet, you should have gagged me.”

The shape nods, the hold on Dorian’s thigh tightens. “Should have.”

Dorian feels the words, gets harder for them, gets hazy, and he could sink into that and let himself ignore the off parts, the things that are obviously wrong, but he knows he would feel ill when it was said and done, so instead he says, “Get off of me,” in as controlled, sober, and clear a voice as he can.

Bull does, without hesitation, moving back far enough that they’re no longer touching one another at all.

“Going to storm out in a huff?” he asks, and it’s an infantile cruelty, cruelty for cruelty’s sake, but he sounds almost hopeful. Bull wants him to go, since he won’t lay still and quiet, is trying to goad him into letting him alone, and a different version of Dorian would call his bluff and throw it back in his face, tell him to get bent and swan off into the night, make him come crawling on hands and knees to beg forgiveness, but that man has been worn into softer shapes by things that Bull has whispered into his ear, ways that he has touched his neck, his back, the crook of his elbow.

“No, as a matter of fact, I’m not, characteristic as it would be,” he says, keeping a tight hold on his tone. “It just seems to me that if we’re going to have this conversation, I ought to be able to sit up and look you in your face.”

Dorian wills it and the candles light themselves, first flaring bright, then settling down to flicker dimly across the bed, the sheets, Bull’s good eye and how it’s edging glances at the summoned fire, his fists and how they’re clenching. 

“What conversation?”

Dorian pushes himself up, stiffens his shoulders. “The one where I’m perfectly honest.” He smiles self-deprecatingly, for once with no intention of dazzling. “I couldn’t have done this a few months ago, not with you, not with anyone, but I can now because you’re—you’ve made it feel alright, allowed. Or, you had. Not right now. Now you’re just being unpleasant, but I like you well enough to put up with it for the moment because I assume you have a good reason.” He shifts sideways, puts his feet on the cold stone floor, looks at Bull with unmistakable intention. “I do know you well. I know when you’re putting on a show, and I know when you’re not, and I know when you’re afraid. I know you like me better than you meant to. You’re really quite sweet on me, preoccupied by me. You stare and you stare when you think I’m not looking. You’re not sleeping with anyone else at all. Sex and friendship do not automatically lead to romantic attachment, I agree with that much, but sometimes things get twisted up, complicated. Sometimes people get attached. Just because the Qun says one thing doesn’t make that the inarguable truth.”

Up until the last remark, the Bull’s expression had been softening, but at the mention of the Qun it goes rigid again, and he stands, looks elsewhere.

“I think you should leave.”

“Why?” Dorian refuses to believe that he’s wrong, that Bull—doesn’t. He refuses to be embarrassed, or disgusted with himself. 

Bull turns back to him, and says, without vigor in his voice, but rather lit in his eyes, “Because right now, I want to hurt you, and not in the way that you like. I want to fight you. Beat you down. Want you to hurl fireballs at me, lightning, ice, anything. I want us to tear each other to bits, destroy,”—his voice trembles a little bit with the effort at keeping it even—“everything, mindless animalistic rage and violence.” 

Dorian’s body warms at those words but every sensible part of him winces. “Why?”

Bull jaw clenches so hard that Dorian can see it spasm. “Because I can,” he says. “Because I’m no longer bound by the Qun. The Qun is nothing to me, and I’m nothing to it. Tal-Vashoth.”

Dorian blinks. “You…” _Oh_. He’d had little doubt that Bull’s mood was a result of his dealings with the Qunari, but his assumptions had been self-centered. He’d spoiled himself with the thought that Bull was trying to disengage from whatever he might be feeling for Dorian in order to more fully uphold the teachings of the Qun. He hadn’t considered that it might have nothing to do with him at all.

“Yeah.” Bull grimaces, obviously pleased by Dorian’s speechlessness. “It was a fun trip.”

“What did—I mean to say, what exactly happened?”

“You mean you want to know what I did? What made me such a rabid, irredeemable beast? It was nothing. It wasn’t—I saved my men. I let the Dreadnought sink, and I saved _my men_. Selfish, acting for one’s own good instead of the good of the many. Wham! Tal-Vashoth.” He moves to stand over Dorian, suddenly talkative, suddenly taken with the fever that’s been boiling in him. “I can go a lot more Tal-Vashoth. I can be a lot more selfish. I’ve got no direction, no code. I’m finally the degenerate savage that you fantasized about. I can break you like you want me to. I can break anything, anyone. I can do whatever I want.”

He sounds utterly frightened. 

Dorian isn’t. He digests the reality, the implications, then stands, doesn’t let the Bull’s bulk above him lock him to his seat.

“And that’s what you want?” he asks, unable to be as gentle as the Bull has always been with him, his moods, his terrors. “Really, this has all been a show? You’ve been steered by the Qun to be a decent person, and without it you’re just some animal who wants only to fuck and fight and murder?” He raises his eyebrows so high his forehead starts to hurt. “And I suppose I’m a social degenerate who’s debased his entire family line by refusing to sacrifice my identity and happiness for the sake of an outdated custom?”

“It’s not,”—and Dorian knows Bull is going to say, _the same_ , but he doesn’t even let him get that far.

”You’re saying that nothing you did or said before was really you, it was all just the Qun? Excuse me, but I think you’re full of shit.”

Bull’s looking at him like he’d expected something else, some other reaction. The air is warm and they both smell like sex. He takes a step forward, makes Dorian tilt his chin up to look him in the eyes. “Hissrad means liar.”

Dorian scoffs. “I know what it means. You haven’t been Hissrad for a very long time. You’re the Iron Bull, that’s what you named yourself. That’s what you are, because you chose to be, and you chose to be here, and you chose your men over—over I don’t know what. But if you hadn’t saved them, and hadn’t been cast out as Tal-Vashoth, would you feel better? Would you be a better person then? A true Qunari that follows the true Qun and does things he doesn’t believe in just because he’s told to? Is that what you’re wishing for right now?”

Bull shakes his head. “You don’t understand.”

Dorian cannot contain his unimpressed laugh. “Don’t I? Didn’t I leave behind everything I had been raised to believe, too?”

“But you didn’t ever really _believe it_ ,” Bull grits into his face, breath hot, stifling, full of self-loathing, or loathing for something else, something he’s conflating with himself. “It never gave you purpose. It never made you feel like it was the only thing between you and total annihilation of every person you came into contact with.”

Dorian wants to shake him, wants to tell him that no one has ever been so gentle with him, but doesn’t know how to form those words. “Is that how you felt before you went to the coast? In all those months here?”

Bull stares at him, shakes his head minutely.

“Did you want to annihilate me? Lavellan? Krem? Anyone?” 

“No, but,”—

“So what’s the difference now?” He reaches out, puts his hand on Bull’s chest, daring him to hit him, fight him, do all of the horrible things he’s threatening himself with. “You’re the same as you’ve ever been since I met you, you’re just called something else.”

“But I could.” He looks down at Dorian’s hand, looks and looks and doesn’t move a muscle. “If I wanted to, if I decided to, I just _could_.”

“You always could have.” Dorian had started out slightly afraid of Bull, but hasn’t been for a very long time. Pressed to walls, beds, held down, tied up, yanked about, marked and manhandled and still never feeling unsafe, never fearing him for an instant. They’re both dangerous things, but there’s no danger between them. “You’re no more a threat than you’ve ever been. No worse, no better. Actually, I think you’re probably better off. Not right now, in this particular moment, but you will be. I know I was, after I left.”

Bull shakes his head, then stops, slumps his shoulder, breathes out. Tides of emotion come, storm one, and then die out. Bull looks more exhausted than he ever has after sex, closes his eyes, then opens them again and looks at Dorian. His skin is warm under Dorian’s hand, and Dorian can’t come up with anything original, so he borrows a kindness once shown to him, nudges Bull, and says, “I’ll help you, if you want.” 

The weight in the air diffuses, the lock of Bull’s muscles eases, and he looks at Dorian in a way he hasn’t before, not directly. It’s a look he normally gives to his hands, or the scenery, or the ceiling after a particularly enthusiastic fuck, pointing it elsewhere, not hiding it, but not insisting that Dorian meet it, either. Now it’s laid out, it’s obvious. Dorian’s words from before hang between them: _You’re really quite sweet on me_.

“Dorian,” he says.

Dorian gives him a small smile. He feels tender in places he hadn’t known existed at all. His cock is growing softer, flesh gone a little cold, and he’s wishing he had his robe with him. He reaches down to collect his clothes, but just so Bull knows he has no intention of leaving, he says, “Want tea?” 

Bull shakes his head. “I want to suck your dick.”

“That’s… not even remotely the same thing.”

Bull doesn’t touch him, not disobeying Dorian’s earlier request, but gives him a look that’s as good as a long, slick tug. “I want you to tie my hands behind my back so that I know I can’t hurt you, and then suck your dick until you’re begging me to stick my,”—

“Ahem, indeed.” Even after all this time, Dorian can’t help the heat that flares up his neck. “But don’t you think that’s a tad bit unwise? Restraining you, feeding into the complex that makes you believe that you’re some kind of beast that needs to be controlled?”

Bull tilts his head, appears to consider it, then shrugs. “I’ll let you come on my face.”

Dorian’s breath goes uneven. “You, my friend, have yourself a deal.” 

As if this, of all things, can solve a problem: skin on skin, saliva, semen, dirty things, pleasurable things, wet things, hot things. As if there is safety in them. As if there is communion. Bull’s wrists are big; Dorian’s knots aren’t tight. They kiss each other laughing. Dorian is not so much braver than he had been those few months ago, but he is a bit.

 

—

 

“Whatever you did to the chief,” Krem tells him in the courtyard the next day, sun glaring off of his breastplate, mountain wind shaking the leaves from the trees and drowning out the sounds of the errant conversations going on around them, “keep doing it.”

“Excuse me?” Dorian tries not to squint, as it’s ever so unflattering to one’s features.

Krem looks at him like they’re both in on the same secret. “Come on, he was a wreck on the way back from the coast. Held it together in front of the Inquisitor, kept quiet and all, but I could tell he was on the edge of breaking down, or, you know, breaking something, probably a priceless Exalted Age relic that would have Josephine coming after my ass to get him to cover the cost. I was prepared to get thrashed during training today, but he’s been, well, he’s almost chipper.”

That’s possibly very gratifying to hear, but Dorian doesn’t let himself fully feel it, won’t do until he’s alone.

“How do you know I did anything?”

Krem rolls hie eyes. “Well, I already asked Lyanna in the kitchens, didn’t I? And Davey from,”—

“Alright, yes, you’re welcome.” Dorian’s not interested in a comprehensive list of every person that Bull has slept with. He’s already picked that scab, bled that wound dry. He’s felt all he needs to feel about it. It’s not consequential. “I’m a marvel. Please try to contain your gratitude. Maybe convey it in a short thank you note delivered via carrier pigeon." 

Krem smirks, like he’d been looking to get Dorian’s ire up, wants to see him squirm and stammer and go doe-eyed for the great behemoth. He loves Bull, Dorian understands for perhaps the first time. It’s obvious in their interactions, but it’s quiet, not emphasized, not important. It simply is.

Dorian finds that he likes that. Bull ought to be loved. He’s—it’s inexpressible, but he’s a specific sort of good that goes unnamed. 

Perhaps Krem can tell that he likes that, perhaps Krem likes that he does. He gets too close as he walks past, smells nice, says, “You’re alright, ‘Vint,” as he knocks Dorian’s shoulder with his own, and doesn’t look back, but Dorian can tell from his voice that he’s grinning.

 

—

 

Dorian’s fucked men before. Certainly he knows where to put it, and how, and what speed to go and where to put his hands, but this—it’s a different experience.

“Go faster,” Bull says, laid on his back, legs propped open by Dorian’s hips, heels pressing large marks into his lower back.

“It’s—I can’t get a proper angle.” Dorian’s red-faced, huffing his exertion, bearing down into grey skin, tough skin, surrounded on all sides by Bull’s body, Bull’s thighs and knees and gripping hands. He’s sweating. Bull looks amused, content.

“Try harder,” he says, and Dorian does.

He’d teased when Bull had suggested it, had said he’d wanted to try something different—“Consensual sex in the missionary position? You absolute degenerate, you,”—but he feels foolish now, like he’s been shown something new, taught a thing or two about a thing he didn’t think he needed lessons on. It’s hot, engulfing, not so tight, the parts don’t fit snug and he cannot possibly go deep enough, but Bull doesn’t seem to mind, just hums his pleasure and gives orders as Dorian works himself up a great deal.

“You’re pretty when you fuck me,” Bull tells him, reaching up to stroke a line over his forehead, the heavily styled curl of his hair brushed back in a sweaty mess.

Dorian’s not sure that he believes that at this particular moment, but he grins and breathes, “Of, hah, course I am.” 

They’re leaving for the Emprise Du Lion tomorrow. Dorian’s things are packed, Bull’s are not, and they’d discussed strategy with Lavellan in the tavern earlier that night, sitting across from each other, sharing drinks, speaking like comrades in arms and not—what is the word? Whatever they are, are aren’t quite. It doesn’t matter. Lavellan doesn’t treat them differently, besides a look here and there. They are still her soldiers, and she their commander. 

“And how is the life of a Tal-Vashoth treating you, Bull?” she’d asked, quite artlessly, not looking to soothe egos or skirt uncomfortable subjects. 

Bull hadn’t been uncomfortable, or if he had, he’d masked it well, in his cool Ben-Hassrath way. He’d just grunted a laugh, said, “Bit more kindly than I’ve treated it,” and nothing else. Two assassins were sent the day before last, but Lavellan knows that, had watched Dorian char one into an unrecognizable corpse.

“Want you to come in me,” Bull purrs up at him, eyes hazy, body thrumming, “want you to come until you’re all loose and exhausted, and then I’ll flip you over and fuck you into the exact place on the mattress where you fucked me. You want that?”

Dorian nods all too enthusiastically.

When he’s flipped, bones loose in his skin and nerves burning bright, and pressed face forward to the sheets, slid into, soft, soft and not brutal, not near as hard as he’d gone on Bull, he gathers what voice he has left in him, looks back over his shoulder, and mumbles, “Still afraid you’ll break me?”

“I’m not afraid for you.” Bull slides his cock in, presses deep, slow and maddening. Dorian’s thighs tremble. “This is for me. Selfish, I know, but I’m trying to temper myself. Maybe I’m the same as I’ve always been, but I have to make sure that I’m in control of,”—a thrust, a swallow,—“what I want.”

Dorian thinks to complain, that it would be in line with his personality, the image of himself that he upholds, but he’s overcome with an affection that he cannot hold tight to, cannot contain or disguise, something wide and bottomless and gnawing. 

He says, “Alright, I suppose I’ll allow it.”

Bull grins into the back of his neck, thrusts in deep and gratifying. “Very generous of you.”

“Isn’t it?”

Dorian’s almost sure his voice doesn’t quiver with pleasure at all.

 

—

 

It’s cold and wet and wretched in the Emprise and there’s a metallic stink coming off of the red lyrium that makes Dorian’s staff hand twitch. They’re sat at camp around a rather ineffective fire, Sera wrapped in furs and a gaudy hat that she’d pulled off of a Templar corpse, Lavellan counting supplies, Bull counting his new scars.

Sera mutters, “The fade is miserable here,” in her usual crowd pleasing impression of Solas. 

Bull snorts and claps Dorian on the back. “It’s not the only one.”

“Me? I’m perfectly cheery. I’ve lost feeling in most of my toes, and I think there’s a bit of darkspawn still in my hair, but really, this is pleasant. I do so enjoy these sojourns, Inquisitor.”

Lavellan glances up at him, smirks at his hair. “And here I thought that was just a new style you were trying.”

Bull laughs the loudest at that, but he always does, great booming voice shaking the snowbirds from the trees. Sera has a lot of colorful opinions about Dorian’s hairstyle that she takes this particular moment to make known. Dorian stifles his grin, but Bull is looking at him, and Bull can see it. He is safe, even in the midst of the danger. 

There’s a hole in the sky, and these are his friends.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so much for reading. comment, kudos, critique, etc. would make my day.
> 
> (my tumblr url is deathnoting and if any of ya'll wanna holler at ya girl about this ship, pls do. nobody i know cares about it and nobody who cares about it knows me.)


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